Tosca
Millennium Centre, Cardiff/Touring

WELSH National Opera's opening night performance of Tosca was sublime, with superb acting and singing from Claire Rutter as Tosca, Hector Sandoval as the painter Cavaradossi and Mark Doss as the evil Baron Scarpia.

Giacomo Puccini’s tale of love, lust, power and corruption, driven by his divine music, gets a breathtaking start in the opening act set in the Sant’Andrea della Vale church. There, Cavaradossi is helping escaped political prisoner Cesare Angelotti (ably sung by Daniel Grace) evade the clutches of Scarpia and his secret police.

Director Michael Blakemore's deft touch provides some light relief in the heavily atmospheric church, with Donald Maxwell's sacristan providing a nicely judged balance of comic timing and beautiful singing in his duet with Cavaradossi.

The priest, suspicious of the artist, thinks he may have republican sentiments and be an enemy of the church, a refrain Scarpia echoes later in the second act.

But it is with Tosca's entrance that the opera really comes alive. Her coquettish attempts to act piously while simultaneously flirting with her lover Cavaradossi is a joy.

She ramps up the emotional temperature as she seeks to find out who Cavaradossi was speaking to in the church before she entered. What really fuels her jealousy is her suspicion that he has based his painting of the Madonna on Marchesa Attavanti, a regular churchgoer and she entreats Cavaradossi to change the woman’s blue eyes to brown as she exits.

Cue the arrival of one of opera's all-time evil characters as Scarpia swaggers in. Seizing on the fan left behind by the fleeing jailbreaker, he realises that it belongs to his sister Marchesa Attavanti and uses it to fuel Tosca’s jealously.

Doss creates a true monster but his aria, counterbalanced by the singing of the church choir and townswomen, is beautiful.

In the second act, Scarpia has Cavaradossi tortured to get Tosca to reveal Angelotti’s hiding place and Puccini’s work takes on a contemporary relevance as Scarpia offers to free Cavaradossi from his death sentence if Tosca sleeps with him.

This leads to one of the greatest soprano arias in opera as Tosca sings Vissi d’Arte — “I lived for my art, I lived for love” — wondering why, after all she has done, God would abandon her.

A wonderfully staged opera, well worth every one of its five stars.

Tours until April 20, details: wno.org.uk